2.
Some inestimable time later, my senses seemed to rise, akin to putrefactive gases voiding from a lime-pit. It was upon the pristine floor of Miss Aheb’s lavish yet eldritchly lit bed-chamber that my consciousness re-found me; in fact, my first sight was that of the corrupt chandelier suspended overhead, shimmering in its queer anti-light.
Of the dimension-transcending trolley-ride back, I remembered nary a detail. I was alone, however, and as I roused myself, I checked my pocket-watch to see, to my dismay, that the time was but four-thirteen in the morn…
Only one minute later than when I’d checked so long ago!
The watch continued to tick, though, the second-hand revolving…
Just like Erwin mentioned. This place, and that horrendous domain I’ve just returned from, must exist in some daedalic contravention of time…
A strange tapping cut into my ruminations, tapping which I recognized eventually as footsteps. It was my sister, maskless but dressed once more in her conductor’s garb, who crossed the mosaic flooring. The chamber’s bizarre acoustics lent to her voice an uncanny echo. “Oh, Morgan, I’m so sorry about what they made you do.”
“It was of my own free volition that I came here in the first place, and of my own free volition that I smuggled myself aboard Trolley 1852,” I recited. “All in the interest in finding you.”
“You’re such a gallant man, Morgan. I can only imagine your disgust with me.”
“Disgust?” I asked, irked. “You’re my only sibling, and I love you with my whole heart. Please know that.”
“But to learn that your only sibling could stoop so low as to submit to prostitution…”
“My dearest sister, what you must also know is that I fully understand the travails that force women to resort to such alternatives. In these times of economic cataclysm, women even more than men suffer from the throes of subjugation.” Groggily, I sat up. “This, believe me, I comprehend, and I love you no less.”
Selina seemed relieved to hear this, relieved enough even to sob. But what I simply could not reckon was the hideousness of her maligned complexion, the once-beauteous countenance made appalling by the swirls of phlegmatic-green mixed with fish-belly white. “I had no choice but to consign myself to the life of a common street-whore but even then I was homeless and barely able to eat…”
“I understand that,” I reiterated. “But… what I don’t understand is…”
“The change,” she finished for me, and touched her face with loath. “Eventually some girls corralled me into the club, but as I briefly explained earlier, I did not service johns for long after my arrival. It turned out, Miss Aheb fell in love with me, so… she changed me…”
“Your skin,” I knew. “She effected a metamorphosis, to make your skin like hers”—I gulped—“and like the skin of Pyramidiles and the thoggs.”
“With this, yes,” she explicated, fingering the pendant. “The change allows me to live forever, but this is what I’ll have to do… forever. She wants me all to herself; and when I’m not servicing her, I conduct the trolley and, every week or so, see to the transport of our… collection across the ingression threshold.”
Collection, I thought numbly. The constant collection of human semen to be used for God knows what by the Pyramidiles…
“The legend is true,” I droned. “The club’s matron, Miss Aheb, and the witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb of thousands of years bygone are one in the same!”
Did the chandelier’s counter-light suddenly climb in intensity? It was Miss Aheb herself who next strode into the chamber, adorned in the diaphanous black gown which highlighted her preeminent physique. Yet the sleek arms and legs, the plunging decolletage, and her face remained abhorrent by her skin’s similarity to that of the mountainous Pyramidiles. I knew now that the leviathanic monsters had, through some occult mode, shared their hideous skin with Miss Aheb and Selina. What other traits beyond appearance might this dermal metamorphosis have instigated?
“Why, immortality, Mr. Phillips,” the lithe madam answered via some manner of psychic surveillance. Her coy smile beamed down on me as her accent buoyed her words. “You know much of what very few know at all.”
“The legend of the Pyramidiles and their utmost servitor is obscure to be sure,” I asserted, “but some trace of their history has remained. Cuneiform cylinders analogous to the cylinder in your own possession, for instance. It is a legend that pre-dates legendry…”
“And therefore?”
My words abraded like stones grinding. “The oldest legend in human history.”
“Very good,” she congratulated and sashayed about Selina. Her grotesque-colored hand caressed my sister’s bosom as she did so; whereupon, she proceeded to a great armchair nestled in the room’s corner: a throne for all intents, composed of adhered jewel-like crystals of the same composition as the pendants. It was here that she sat, elevated and grinning cunningly, as some sluttish, monstrous version of Cleopatra, some iniquitous queen of the Halls of Eblis. “And now? Whatever shall we do with you?”
“Answer my questions,” I dared. “What harm can there be in that, given that my chances of surviving the night are in all likelihood non-existent.”
Her expression turned wanton as she considered my request; likewise, her hands lifted her plenteous breasts out of the accouchement of her gown, where she then titillated herself before me. “Your desire to know is like the lust of a beast in rut, Mr. Phillips. Do you believe that you will be better fortified by such knowledge when I have your life snuffed out?”
“I quite indubitably do.”
Her fingertips twirled the papillae of each distended nipple, generating a sensation which caused her to seethe. “Very well…”
“In exactitude just what are these mountain-sized creatures known as the Pyramidiles?”
Some psychic directive compelled Selina to approach the throne and, with immediacy, bring her lips to Miss Aheb’s bosom. “They are so much more than creatures, Mr. Phillips, and even so much more than gods. I’m surprised a man of your erudite distinction has failed to make that deduction. They are not millions of years old, nor even billions, but so much older that their existence transcends time as we know it. They are ageless.” She paused to concentrate on the pleasures lent to her via my sister’s lips. “Creatures? No. They are poly-sentient bio-machines, self-perpetuating organic industries, Mr. Phillips. They create vast technologies via their immeasurable intellect and then produce their own laborers to make those technologies transitive.”
“The thoggs,” I uttered.
“Oh, yes. But the thoggs you’ve beheld are but one variety of a multitude. The Pyramidiles breed them, you see, specifically for implementation on this planet. There are hundreds more incarnations, for hundreds of other worlds, and when I say ‘worlds,’ I mean not only other planets in this and other solar systems but also planes of alternate existence in other dimensions and other terrestrial realms the likes of which even an advanced mind such as yours could never cogitate.”
“So that awful abode of theirs is not a planet of itself?”
“No, nor is it a dimensional firmament, Mr. Phillips. It is an esoteric terrascape of their own creation, just as the thoggs and all their multiple variations are the Pyramidiles’ very creation as well.”